


letters to jonathan

by tigrrmilk



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 21:12:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13039506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: Months after her husband has disappeared, taking both residences with him, Arabella Strange comes across one of their missing wine glasses.





	letters to jonathan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feroxargentea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/gifts).



> happy yuletide!

> 
>     For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
>     For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
> 
> \- christopher smart, _jubilate agno_ , fragment b ( _'on his cat jeoffrey'_ )

 

 

 

 

Months after her husband has disappeared, taking _both_ residences with him, Arabella Strange comes across one of their missing wine glasses. She is sure that it must be one of theirs, even though she has only moved in to her new home recently. After all, this room had been mostly bare when she moved in. And the glass is of an unfortunately distinctive design.

Rather: it's very ugly, and Arabella has long thought so. Why is this the object that has chosen to come back?

It is small but rather heavily-hewn. The likeness of Britannia on its side is not delicate or lively. But the glasses were a gift, a long time ago, and there is some comfort in the object, held in both of Arabella’s hands.

The apartment a few roads north of Soho Square was all but unfurnished when Mrs Strange finally secured its lodging. In the months since then she has found a pleasing sofa, two nice chairs, an elegant table, and some shelving for a few books and other miscellaneous objects. But while it is hard to lose a husband of whom you are quite fond, Arabella feels that it may be even tougher to lose your home and everything in it.

She had just been wondering about how best to procure some wine glasses. And now here she has an old trusted one - returned to her.

There is even residue of some long-ago drink, stuck in the bottom of it. Either red wine or blood. She hopes for the former, but considering some of her husband’s antics --

She sighs, and places the glass on her pretty wooden table. It is not big enough for many to dine at... but she does take breakfast at the table, and perhaps luncheon or supper with a very few intimate friends. Lady Pole, her brother... a close neighbour, perhaps, or even an eager wife or student of a magician, looking to speak to her about what she knows.

Arabella rarely indulges these enquiries, but some such acquaintances cannot be helped.

It is late afternoon, but it is almost high summer, and it will be light outside for a good few hours yet. The reason Arabella had her heart set on this apartment originally was its quality of light; and so she will sit near the window and draw. Previously she has drawn social gatherings from memory and life... but here she can sit for hours and draw something stranger, if she wishes.

She does not always _wish_. She will still draw dances, and new gowns that she has seen on Pall Mall... but sometimes, also, she will draw dreams, or strange dances, or strange rooms that she can only make sense of on paper.

So... she will draw, she thinks. Often it is the best way to empty her head, and to make her body busy itself with creating and moving. There is no better way to spend idle time.

But recently, she has received some new books. One of them is a story of a governess, and magic. It has come to her in plain binding. She did not send for it. She has heard from the magazines, and her maid, and from everyone else that it is the talk of the town. The author it is attributed to is likely a pseudonym; likely the author is an authoress from the North of England. Or so Arabella hears. And she has heard... a lot of things.

That is to say -- nobody has said _It is the talk of the town_. But everybody talks of it. And she did not order it, and yet a copy came. She does not know who the author is; she does not care to know. But she hears talk. She does her best to disregard it. She, who has spent so long with Jonathan on the matter of acquiring and also creating books -- she knows of the power they can have. And she does not need to read a book about magic. Not even, certainly not, a _novel_.

And yet. Sometimes, she can feel the book calling to her. The fat fan of pages, unopened. There is no title on the spine, and so Arabella had to open to the title page of the book when it arrived just to check what it was that she was holding. She turned it over in her hands when she had done so, and even shook it a little. No explanation was forthcoming. No note flew out. She was determined to leave the rest of the pages unopened, unrevealed. As if they were blank.

“It’s paid for, miss,” the delivery boy had said, in a stooped bow. He was still a child, and wouldn’t take the book back when she tried to return it.

“ _You_ take this copy, then,” she said, exasperated, holding it out once more. “I didn’t ask for it. Why don’t you keep it? I’m sure you’re not overburdened with reading material.”

A silly thing to say to a boy who works delivering books, no matter how poor and slight he may be. What else is there to do on these long summer afternoons, loitering around booksellers' premises or or St Paul's Churchyard but read? Arabella can’t imagine.

“I can't go 'gainst the wishes of the patron,” the delivery boy said, and quickly took his leave, the fat coin Arabella had tipped him with when he first handed over the book clutched in his hand.

It is two weeks later now, and Arabella has still not read the book. She has read the _Edinburgh Review_ , _Pilgrim’s Progress_ (a book that she will freely admit that she hates, but she believes it is good for her to read it every few years), _Hebrew Melodies_ (twice in the past week alone), _First Impressions_ , _The Wanderer_ , and a few letters that she has received from her friends and acquaintances.

It is a lot of reading. But Arabella finds herself occupying her hands and mind with reading material more and more so that she does not stray towards the mysterious book.

Why is she so averse to it? Arabella is only human, and of course she would like to understand the gossip and chatter that she hears. But magic, in a novel? Once again, she sighs. In these times, she has to be honest about her own feelings. It is not a moral objection. She is not scandalised, as she believes some in society somehow are (as if they do not see what happens in the world every day). But even now, she is not sure she can stand it.

Either it will be wrong -- this seems the most likely outcome, and it would be extremely frustrating. Or it will be right, and it will hurt.

Outside, the wind is blowing. Arabella would like coffee, and a cake with no seeds or raisins in. She would like cream, perhaps, or an apple from the tree in her childhood garden. Her brother cut it down when he inherited the house, and she can barely stand to visit it now, although he insists that he was forced to do it. _The apples were so sour and twisted_ , he wrote in reply to her first angry letter. _Dear Bella, even you would not have liked to eat them these past two years_.

Which is nonsense. Arabella has liked sour fruit since she was a contrary child. And those apples were always as knobbly as the old parson's knees, and none the worse for it.

Arabella would like her husband to be here. She would like him to answer the letters she persists in writing to him. She would like people to stop writing to her about Venice, about the Raven King, about dining table magic, about books they would like to borrow that they for some reason think that she has and can multiply -- like they think she's Christ, making a feast out of the paltry bread and fishes.

_I do not have nothing_ , Arabella thinks. She looks at her table. A novel she has not read. Her paper knife. An empty cup. A stack of letters that she has not yet responded to. Unlit candles. _The Times_. And now, a wine glass, empty but for a small amount of dusty residue at the bottom.

_It’s a still life_ , Arabella thinks. Just a few things, laid out. Nothing in motion. It's her life, though. It's something. Even if it's not much more than a bowl of fruit. It's days and days and days, written in her diary, stretched out in front and behind of her like those damned, unknowable, unplottable King's Roads.

She calls for her maid. Yes, it is time for coffee and cake.

She holds out for three more days before she gives in and reads the damned book. Cover-to-cover, in the middle of the night; she reads by candlelight. She has a headache for the rest of the week and barely leaves her bed, but she supposes, in the end, that it was worth it. At times she feels as though the author has reached a hand inside her chest, and squeezed. At times she has to stop herself from throwing the thing across the room, or into the fire.

A month later, she finds the other wine glass. Under her bed this time, wedged up against the wall. This one is empty and clean, but for a small crack down one side. But it can't be helped -- or at least, not without magic or money. At least she once again has a small matching set.

She does not stop writing letters to Jonathan. She sees no reason for that. She comes to associate the ash on the air and the pads of her fingers with him. She thinks about the black column in the sky, about the hysterical reports from Venice, the papers she bought _in_ Venice that she could barely read or understand...

All but ash. A smear of charcoal on paper. Singeing her hem as she lights her evening candle, or goes to snuff it out. Her maid fusses, but Arabella doesn't mind it. Not even the small hole she burns in her sleeve one day.

"It's not you what has to mend it," her maid mutters, so quietly that Arabella almost doesn't hear.

Years pass. She finds another glass. And another. As if they're raining from the sky. As if they're heavy shoes dropping as a duke undresses for bed. As if Arabella is going to turn her face up to the sky one day and find herself hit in the face by a heavy glass with an image of Britannia on it.

_If only they weren't so ugly_ , Arabella says. They are lined up, tightly packed together, in her best cabinet. The collection is almost ready to outgrow her lodgings. She dreads that day. But she supposes it will come to pass. Everything else does; this likely will too.

She will just have to start giving the glasses away.

And still that first glass is the same as ever. A small, dried-up stain on the bottom. Old and dirty, and a sign of something long gone -- a drink, a toast, a late night talking by the fire, or writing unwise letters and notes and poems. A record of something that Arabella does not know, and can't write down. Just the one dirty glass. Just one that she won't use, or clean.

"They're too ugly to be on display and never used," Arabella says of the others, and so she does insist on their use when she has company. Soon they will be antique. And still she keeps the first one close. And she keeps the unmarked book, and her small pile of drawings. And she sometimes sees lightning from her window, and hears thunder that other people don't hear. And when she strokes her cat, she is sometimes shocked by static. And she receives letters about all kinds of magic. And she sends love up the chimney.

Arabella's cat, it is said, can still find her old house on Soho Square. And yet, he returns to her here -- in this new place. He has a white patch of fur around one eye. Sometimes, he acts as if he can see ghosts, or spirits in the air.

Perhaps he can. Not all that exists can be known by people. The world is sometimes ours, Arabella thinks. And sometimes we find that it is not.

Arabella is a woman of letters. Over time, she undertakes many long correspondences - with friends and strangers, including a number of correspondents that she initially tried to spurn. She writes to the Edinburgh Review (she much prefers it to any of the London magazines). She travels to Llangollen more than once -- Wales is not too far from Shropshire, after all -- to stay with the ladies there, who put her up and talk to her of books and magic and poetry as if it is all one.

She feels untethered from her old life. And she does not wish to become Jonathan. She does not ever want to step into his boots, warm and soft and careworn as they were. She is not here to teach the next generation of magicians, or to pass on wisdom. Nobody is looking for that from her, she supposes. But at first -- a dam had burst, and young magicians were looking for any sort of guidance they could find.

Arabella has much good sense. And her good sense tells her that she should not be offering guidance on this matter.

She likes to drink wine, and read poems. It's not too dear a life, and it is hers. One morning she draws open the curtains in the house of Llangollen, and it is raining so hard that she wonders if the sun has decided to skip a day. _Good-bye my children, and I will see you tomorrow_. But there it is, hidden behind one particularly angry inkblot of a cloud.

And she writes to Jonathan. And she sometimes copies the letters into her diary in her own private code before she burns them; a concession. It is not for him that she writes. But it is not just for her. There is cream at the breakfast table for her coffee. And across the southern half of the country, they are erecting telegraph poles. The North, she supposes, likely does not need it. 

What is magic, but telegraphy between all things? What is it but the joining of bodies? The cat laps up the cream before Arabella has had a chance to. The moon cycles through phases. And in the north of England, an anonymous novelist writes a letter to Arabella, when she would never have dared write to Jonathan in the same way.

It's something. It's a start. The letter passes through the country almost as fast as a signal on a wire. As a bird catching a slower bird. As a cat jumping on a moving rag.

And in the background, on the edges of Arabella's life, wherever it is lived, the glasses drop, and drop, and drop. And they never break.

**Author's Note:**

> [the ladies of llangollen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_of_Llangollen) were historical lesbian literary socialites.


End file.
